A bag of fish

I went to interview a man today. Two days after his surgery. He was 85. Sounded raspy and disjointed on the phone. And he didn't answer the door.

I spent the rest of the morning driving around town looking for someone to make sure he was alive. The black reverend knows everyone, all 300 residents. Even the ones on the other side of the track that's no longer there.

He sat in my passenger seat in worn, black slacks, covered in dust and sweat from yardwork. He'd tacked his shirt with a big safety pin where a button was missing. His wife died a few years ago.

We traveled down dirt roads in the heat hunting the man's family. Finally, we found a woman in the office on his son's farm. She took the man's conspicuous silence, his failure to respond, like a dismissed phone message.

We drove away in the dust. The reverend promised me a bag of fish.


Photo by James Strachan from Corbis.